This symbol isn’t needed for spells this long, but it’s considered best practice and other wizards will make fun of me for not including it, even though it isn’t needed.
shout out to the trickster mod which is basically “what if magic is a lisp”
My brother in Christ, why must you inform us of cool things and leave us with less free time? 🫠
malice
Interesting. Does this provide any game balance whatsoever?
I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to design magic systems when I was a teenager, but they always ended up being either way too powerful or not “rich” enough to be interesting. It’s just really hard to design a simple mechanical system that stays within arbitrary human boundaries.
Hmm, I feel myself getting drawn back in. That’s almost like a zero-knowledge proof, and there’s lots of weird ways to implement cryptographic primitives.
no, it does not. there is a rune that consumes amethyst but it’s just for flavour, so you can give your spell a cost if you want.
i guess you could say the learning curve is a balance feature. it’s an entire functional programming language in a pretty unergonomic form factor, so actually building spells that do anything impressive takes a lot of time.
Only until you’ve figured it out, at which point you’re god. You could make it non-repeatable somehow to avoid that, but magic is depicted as being mainly old, repeated spells most of the time, like in the comic. You could also move to something like Brainfuck or even Malbolge where coding a single new program is hard. As I learned the hard way, though, you’re still going to have no control over what ends up being easy and what’s not.
Actually, it’s more like homeomorphic encryption since you have a system of some bounded complexity instead of a single fixed piece of information. That’s usually harder, but then again you actually want the scheme to be “insecure” in this case.
“Oh, dude, you gotta stop using TJ’s Action Rune of Changed Files. That runebook has a backdoor to one of the hells now. Didn’t you see the patch notes?”
I never update my spell book and nothing bad has ever happened.
Help. Infernal imps somehow got inside my sanctum and used my scrying orb to send rude messages to the rest of the Circle.
You got lucky. Somebody snuck a wyrm into my codex that got all of my thralls mining for coin bits.
whats that? i use yenjis discus checker scroll, i know it was abandoned long ago back in the old days of the spell assemblers (when they were still a thing) but IT. JUST. WORKS. i dont need those fancy new features, i just want to see if the runes and incantations written on my magic discus got corrupt or not.
If you’re adding code you don’t understand to a production system you should be fired
Edit: I assumed it was obvious from context that I’m referring to copy-pasting code from stack overflow or an LLM or whatever without knowing what it does but apparently that needs to be said explicitly.
Many times the code we work on is built in abstractions we don’t know about from top to bottom.
